Brush

Brush is a still life rendering of a single brush — likely a calligraphy or [sumi](/glossary/sumi) brush, given Kim's prolonged training in Tokyo and the centrality of the implement to East Asian visual culture. The work marks a departure from the crowded urban subjects that dominate her practice: where her subway, platform, and carousel pictures register the social density of contemporary Seoul and Tokyo, Brush isolates one object against an emptier ground. The medium — color etching with chine collé and hand coloring — lets Kim model the brush's bristles, ferrule, and shaft through layered intaglio while pigmented paper inlays carry warmer or cooler temperatures than the plate's underlying ink. Hand coloring permits subtle variation across the edition, so each impression resolves the object slightly differently. The decision to give an everyday tool the same compositional weight she elsewhere assigns to crowds or fairground machinery reflects her attention to the heaping ephemera of daily life, here narrowed to a single object loaded with art-historical resonance for a printmaker trained between Korea and Japan.